A new study has identified a small group of "super spreaders" of fake news on Twitter - they make up only 0.3% of accounts on the social network, but spread about 80% of misinformation links. Researchers could have expected that these would be young people who actively use the internet, but as it turns out, most of the fake news is spread by older people, usually women.
The study relied on a panel of over 650,000 Twitter accounts associated with voter registration in the United States - using full names and location information linked to the average demographics of a specific voting district. Initially, researchers identified tweets from users with political content using machine learning, and then checked their messages for links to sites from the "constant misinformation sources" list.
The results were eventually published with several caveats - the researchers could not confirm whether the corresponding voter had full control (or any control) over their account during the election season, and the accuracy of individual stories linked by the spreaders was not verified.
From this set, 2107 accounts were identified (about 0.3% of the total) responsible for 80% of tweets with links to misinformation sources - the so-called "super spreaders" of fake news.
On average, only 7% of news shared on Twitter at that time contained links to sites prone to publishing misinformation. Ultimately, the majority of these were attributed to "super spreaders" for two reasons: firstly, they shared a larger number of news links than anyone else (an average of 16 per day), and also more often relied on fake news sources, accounting for 18% of their links.
Researchers found that over 5% of all accounts followed at least one super spreader, and their tweets received more replies, retweets, and likes than others. During the analysis, it was also estimated that super spreaders accounted for about a quarter of links to misinformation sites accessed by their typical followers. For more than 10% of their followers, they were the sole source of fake news.
These super spreaders were more often female - 60%, and their average age was 58 years old. And although most of the election misinformation was spread mainly in Republican circles, only 64% of super spreaders were registered Republicans (almost 20% were registered as Democrats).
The majority of activity by super spreaders was in the form of retweets - about three quarters of the content.
Source: Ars Technica
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